Solid state imagers, including charge coupled devices (CCD), complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) imagers, and others, have been used in photo-imaging applications. A solid state imager includes a focal plane array of pixel cells, or pixels, as an image sensor, each pixel includes a photosensor, which may be a photogate, photoconductor, photodiode, or other photosensitive element for accumulating photo-generated charge.
Most imagers today produce multi-spectral images having different color channels, e.g., red, blue and green. A common example is the downsampled raw Bayer image resulting from an image sensor. Whether the color images being produced by an image sensor are downsampled from one sensor having multiple color channels or have a full color-plane sensor for each of a plurality of color channels, they are referred to herein as “multi-channel images” to reflect the fact that they contain multiple color planes acquired using spectral filtering.
In the most general case, multi-channel images produced by one or more image sensors are subject to various intra-channel and inter-channel degradations such as out-of-focus blur, channel crosstalk, and noise. In addition, color channels are spatially-correlated due to the structure of the scene being imaged (e.g., a flat area, or an edge, appearing in all channels). The object of image restoration is to eliminate or reduce the various undesirable degradations that affect an image, by determining optimal estimators of the “original”, non-degraded image.
Restoration often begins by expressing the degradation in terms of the following equation:g=Hf+n, where g is the multi-channel acquired image as received by an image processor, e.g., a Bayer image, f is the original, undegraded image, H is a representation of the multi-channel degradation and n is a noise component. This equation is illustrated in FIG. 1, which shows the original, undegraded image f being transformed by the image degradation H and then added to the noise component n to produce the multi-channel image g received in the image processor. Accordingly, the object of the image restoration is to obtain an accurate estimate of the original, undegraded image f by estimating and using an operator that inverts the image degradation H.
The most widespread restoration approaches were developed based on the need to process monochrome images, and are thus single-channel methods. The predominant method for the reduction of degradations of multi-channel images is also done as a single-channel restoration in the sense that each of the color channels are processed independently. It is well-known that approaches that process the channels of a multi-channel image independently are generally inferior to methods that jointly process the channels of the multi-channel image, since the former methods ignore inter-channel degradations and correlations.
While multi-channel image restoration techniques exist that do not process the channels independently, these techniques have many drawbacks, including: restoring only intra- or inner-channel degradations, but not both; containing iterative or recursive processing that is time and resource intensive; and containing the inversion of large, non-diagonal matrices, which is also time and resource intensive.
What is needed is an improved method and apparatus for multi-channel image restoration.